Thinking Outside the Universe: Part 3 of 6 - Reason

 

C.S. Lewis, the British writer and sometimes theologian, talked about the nature of reason in a number of his books. He developed the idea most thoroughly in the opening section of his book Miracles. I would commend that book to you, since he says all this much more clearly than I ever could. Lewis was an atheist as a young adult, but thinking about reason compelled him to change his mind. It didn’t make him a Christian – that came later, but it did make him an unhappy theist. Unhappy, because he didn’t want it to be true. He just realized that it had to be.

     In a naturalistic worldview, the cosmos is everything. All the motion of atoms, electrons and other parts of the cosmos as it exists today can be traced to previous motions of the same, going on and on all the way back to the big bang and on and on all the way into the future. When I say “everything that happens,” that includes everything you think and believe, including any kind of reasoning you do – it’s all determined by naturalistic processes. Lewis puts it this way:

One absolutely central inconsistency ruins [the naturalistic worldview].... The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears.... [U]nless Reason is an absolute--all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based.

— C. S. Lewis, "Is Theology Poetry?", The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses

The argument can be summarized as follows:

1.       No belief is rationally inferred if it can be fully explained in terms of non-rational causes

2.       If naturalism is true, then all beliefs can be fully explained in terms of non-rational causes.

3.       Therefore, if naturalism is true, then no belief is rationally inferred (from 1 and 2).

4.       Therefore, naturalism undercuts itself, because we cannot rationally believe it or anything else.

Although this argument may sound new, we all intuitively know it. I’m sure that everyone has heard an argument in which one person says “you just believe that because…,” as in, “You’re just opposed to such and such because you’re a woman.” You’ll notice that the response to that is always something along the lines of “it’s not because I’m just a woman, it’s because…” followed by some line of reasoning independent of “just being a woman.” We do this because we know that if our reasoning has a cause that’s just inside of us, it’s invalid. If the reason we favor ethanol subsidies is because we are farmers that make money on them, then it’s not a good reason – we need to argue based on a standard that is available to all. You would never hear someone argue that “I am against slavery reparations because I am white.” The problem with any of these statements is that as soon as a non-rational cause for one’s reasoning is exposed, the reasoning is considered invalid. For reasoning to be valid, it can’t be dependent on a non-rational cause. For a naturalist, this is a problem, because all the thoughts in one’s head have a cause. Thoughts are caused by the movement of atoms and electrons in the brain. Those movements were caused by previous movements going on and on all the way back to the big bang or whatever, and none of those causes was rational. For a naturalist, reasoning leads to the conclusion that reasoning is not reasonable.

    Therefore, for reasoning to be valid, it has to originate from outside of nature. If that idea sounds outrageous, I’d like to point out that it is not original even among scientists. Johannes Kepler, the 17^th century German scientist and mathematician, said that scientific inquiry was “thinking God’s thoughts after him.” When we reason correctly, we are thinking God’s thoughts.

     Did I say mathematician? If reason has its origin outside of the universe, what about math? That’s the next topic we should discuss.